Building an App Using JavaScript / TypeScript & Node

Having spent over twenty years on developer tools I was convinced that Eclipse is the last development tool I work on. I was wrong. It all started five years ago as an experiment to see what is possible when it comes to developing in the browser using modern JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Five years later we have shipped Visual Studio Code a new smart code editor that is extensible, open source, and runs cross platform.

Code is now a 350k+ TypeScript application built using web technologies on top of the Electron shell, Node.js and uses hundreds of open source components. It is fascinating to see how many things have changed since working on Eclipse. It was a fun and interesting journey. In this talk I look back on this journey, describe the design and technology decisions, the pivots, and what we learnt along the way.